Browse by Tags

Thanks to those who attended the second meeting of the Boise
SQL Server User Group. We had a good turnout of around 30 people and I hope everyone
enjoyed my presentation of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (SSIS). I tried to
balance the presentation between those who hadn't used SSIS and those who have.

If you are interested in the sample projects, packages, and data files from the talk, here they
are.

Time flies. It's been a year since Dr. Gray, a Microsoft research fellow and Turing
Award-winner, went missing while
sailing off San Francisco. A year ago, at Boise Code Camp 2.0, I hosted a session
on finding Jim
Gray, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Now, a year after Dr. Gray went missing, the Association
of Computing Machinery (the organization that holds the Turing Awards), the IEEE
Computer Society and the University of California-Berkeley have joined to announce
a tribute to Gray, planned for May 31 at the UC Berkeley campus. Jim Gray attended
UC Berkeley from 1961 to 1969 and earned the school's very first Ph.D. in computer
science. Fittingly enough, the tribute will also feature technical sessions for registered
participants.

Microsoft's Patterns
& Practices group recently released the final version of the “Team Development
with Team Foundation Server” Guide. This guide has been in beta for the last couple
of months.

It shows you how to get the most out of Team Foundation Server to help improve
the effectiveness of your team-based software development. Whether you are already
using Team Foundation Server or adopting from scratch, you’ll find guidance and insights
you can tailor for your specific scenarios. It's a collaborative effort between patterns
& practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

Some quick facts:

496 – Total number of pages

18 – Total number of chapters in this guide

11392 – Total number of downloads of the Beta version of this guide

8 – Number of attempts to get the Adobe build to work to generate the guide in .pdf
format

Ok, I finally got fed up with all of the spam in my historical dasBlog postings.
It's really embarrassing to send a link to a a colleague, only to have them snicker
at all of the spam comments and trackbacks.

For those of you who don't know what a trackback is,
it's basically an acknowledgement that enables authors to keep track of who is linking
to, or referring to their articles. When used properly, trackbacks form a communication
link between the two blogs, so that new comments on one blog can basically ping
the other, allowing readers to easily follow discussions on both. The problem is that
spammers have abused this mechanism and bloggers end up with trackbacks and pingbacks
to various gambling, herbal medication, and adult sites.

Earlier this year I joined the ranks, and disabled my trackback and pingback
services in dasBlog. I then followed Scott
Hanselman's advice on using Akismet spam
blocking service.

The big effort was then how to cleanup the <Comment> and <Trackback> elements
that were spam, so, like others before me, I built a tool to assist with this.

This week Microsoft released the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – Project
Server 2007 connector as a CodePlex
project. The project has been up for a few weeks, but is now being broadly advertised.

The TFS-PS2007 connector is designed to integrate the project management capabilities
of TFS with Project Server 2007. It's been developed by the Visual Studio Team System
Rangers in response to significant customer demand for a connector solution. Future
versions of Team System will have native integration with Project Server, in the meantime
this Connector solution is the best way to integrate the two Microsoft products. This
solution builds on the previous PS2003 VSTS Connector, published on GotDotNet.